Wesley Chan may often be seen wearing his trademark buffalo hat, but he may be even more famous for his ability to spot unicorns.
Throughout his career in venture capital, he has invested in over 20 unicorns, including AngelList, Dialpad, Ring, Rocket Lawyer and Sourcegraph, and five of those companies became decacorns: Canva, Flexport, Guild Education, Plaid and Robinhood. Chan's investments were the first in most of them.
He worked as an engineer at Google during its early days before becoming an investor, starting his venture capital career at Google Ventures and then Felicis Ventures, and is currently co-founder and managing partner at FPV Ventures, where he leads the two-year-old firm's $450 million venture capital fund with co-founder Pegher Ebrahimi.
While these successes have been well-documented over the years, his personal journey is… less well known. Chan spoke to TechCrunch about how his life influences his startup investing.
His story began before he was born, when his family immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the 1970s.
“They came here with no money. In fact, they had no money at all growing up,” Chan said. “It's really interesting to see their journey. They didn't speak a word of English, and they still don't speak English very well, but they felt the need to build a new life.”
Chang admits he may not have been as appreciative of his parents' patience when he was younger, but growing up in a hardworking immigrant household with little money taught him how to discern nuance and be an adaptable person.
“I'm in an industry where people are so quick to judge me,” Chang says. “There are a lot of people on my LP who don't have the same background as me. I have to pick up all the songs they've been trained to do and change like a chameleon, and send a signal to them that they can trust me.”
How I got into MIT despite having poor grades
Chang's parents divorced when he was a child, and he was raised by his mother as a single parent. During high school, he worked three jobs to support his family, including as a parking attendant, a waiter and a dishwasher in a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology.
He found a dishwashing job through an ad on Craigslist and remembers taking the 42-minute No. 22 bus from his working-class Southern California town to Caltech, where he washed beakers.
One day, his lab manager, Ellen Rosenberg, a well-known genetic biologist, asked him to read some college-level books on biology and lab techniques. Not wanting to lose his job, he obliged.
“I barely took any biology classes in high school,” Chan said. “I went to a high school that wasn't very good. I just had to get through school. Other kids were playing sports after school or taking PSAT prep classes. Not only did I not have that, I also had to earn money for my family.”
Ultimately, regardless of his high school experience, Rosenberg saw something in Chang: When one of his PhD students dropped out, Chang was promoted to the lab, and he continued to work in research for the next three years of high school.
This was in the early 1990s, when stem-cell research was just beginning: Rosenberg's team taught the teenage Chang how to do the work, and he later became part of the group that discovered the protocol for turning stem cells into red blood cells and helped the team publish a journal paper on the protocol.
One day, Rosenberg, who had attended both Harvard and MIT, asked Chang if he had ever thought about going to college.
“I was like, 'Oh my God, I need to finish this job and earn money for my parents, and my mom wants me to go to school,'” he said. “I didn't know she called the admissions office. Someone like a poor immigrant student doesn't understand all this.”
Harvard ignored her, but MIT didn't, and that's why people with terrible grades get into college, Chang said.
“Someone gave me a chance,” he says. “A lot of people have their ups and downs in life. If it hadn't been for someone who said, 'He's working hard. He wants to do research,' I don't think I would have had the opportunities I do today.”
Business lessons from loneliness
Chang says he looks at venture capitalists the same way: Instead of looking for people who've been members of the right country clubs, he looks for people who have grit and understand what it means to work hard.
“One of the lessons I learned growing up like that is that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose,” Chang said. “It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of luck, and ultimately, knowing that there are people out there who are going to help you opens the doors to anything.”
He attributes everything that followed to Rosenberg's help.
“Without MIT, I would never have found Google. Without Google, I would never have found Google Ventures. Without Google Ventures, I would never have found my team at Felicis,” he added. “And without Felicis, Canva and all of these amazing companies run by immigrants and grounded people who grew up in very non-traditional environments like me wouldn't exist.”
To get into MIT, Chang had to leave everything behind in his hometown and move to the other coast. Once there, Chang worked multiple jobs to pay for his tuition, and earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and later a master's in engineering from MIT.
What was it like being away from family? In a word, it was hard. Having to fend for herself meant that Chan wasn't able to take as many classes as she would have liked, nor could she join her friends in taking fun trips during the holidays.
But he also credits the experience as another catalyst for his career as a venture capitalist.
“When I led Canva's Series A, which ended up delivering a 40x+ return on that fund, 111 people turned me down, so it was a very lonely deal to do,” Chang said. “People who can't go to prom because of work, can't go on ski trips, can't go to graduation parties, that's the situation I'm dealing with.”
Such ostracism taught him: “If the whole world laughed at us, who cares? It gives you incredible grit and the ability to like and be okay with being alone.”
After graduation, Chan returned to California and got a job at HP Labs. Then the dot-com bubble burst and the job fell through. But all was not lost: Despite the dire circumstances, there was one company willing to hire him, and it happened to like MIT talent.
Spoiler alert: it was Google. Working at Google is nothing like the movie “The Internship,” in which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lie to get into an internship and compete against other teams on various projects. But it's even better for dog lovers.
“There's a dog running around and I'll run into it and knock it over,” Chan said. “It's not like in the movies. I have to get to work.”
He was assigned to a project to develop an advertising system, which he said was “very fortunate because it was what was most needed at the time.”
Build what founders want
This was the beginning of Chan's 15-year career at Google, which included seven years in product development and five years as chief of staff to Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page, where he worked on projects such as the Google Toolbar, which became Google Chrome.
“It was great to be one of the few that made it,” says Chan. “Larry and Sergey were very gracious and always said, 'Wesley might have something, why don't you let him experiment with it?' That eventually became Google Analytics and Google Ventures.”
He was also one of the people who interviewed Sundar Pichai when he was looking for a job at Google. Needless to say, Pichai later became the CEO of Alphabet and Google.
In 2009, Chan told Google he wanted to start a startup. He joined the company when it had fewer than 100 employees and stayed until it had more than 35,000. Chan remembers being joked that he would end up buying toilet paper if he went to a startup. Chan's response was that he didn't mind buying toilet paper. Instead, he was offered the chance to help Bill Maris start Google Ventures.
“They told me not to be a founder that builds a product that companies want, but to build a product that founders want, and that's what we did,” Chang says. “Google Ventures is still a real company that people want to raise money for.”
Though Chan has overcome obstacles to get to where he is today, he still faces some challenges as a gay Asian working in tech: When he first started in venture capital, senior white men ran the companies and shared deal flow on soccer fields and on safaris in Africa.
He says that even if you want to build a network for deal flow, it's hard if your background doesn't fit the country club mold, and there are few support groups for the LGBTQ+ community within venture capital.
“That's the challenge of being an outsider in this industry,” Chan said. “You have to struggle or find other ways to work with founders so that it doesn't seem like you're slacking or not making progress. If you look at venture capital and the number of successful LGBTQ+ partners, you can count them on two hands. There aren't that many, maybe 6,000 venture capitalists. Why is there such low representation? And the number of people like us who are openly out is even lower.”
That's why he and Pegar Ebrahimi founded FPV Ventures two years ago, to offer an investment style that draws on their unconventional backgrounds (Ebrahimi cut her teeth as Morgan Stanley's youngest CIO before going on to hold C-level roles at a range of tech companies; she even worked on Google's IPO).
And the managing partners do this with the support of charities and foundations: Many of the founders the firm works with “care deeply about making money for good people,” Chan said.
“Our founders are minorities and women, and a really interesting story I hear a lot is that they feel misunderstood,” Chan says. “We find founders who are driven to succeed and have a great combination of humility and success. They also make sure that all their employees are well taken care of.”